In this post, we are going to discuss the greatest gift of the Spirit.
The Greatest Gift of The Spirit (Love)
It is bafflingly easy to spend more time on one gift than all of the others combined, yet it may be stranger still to forget or to soft-pedal or to ignore the objective Paul had in mind when he so thoroughly discussed spiritual gifts with his fellow Christians. In concluding his exposition of the Spirit’s gifts, he urges his readers to “covet earnestly the best gifts,” or “ever seek to excel in the greater gifts” (1 Co. 12:31, Weymouth), and then shows them “a more excellent way, ” the way of charity, or love.
The apostle Paul has just been giving earnest attention to the gifts of tongues, of prophecy, and of knowledge, as given by the Spirit for the development of the church, but lays them all aside to concentrate upon the supreme and essential gift of love.
There is, of course, a reason for Paul’s focusing upon a gift that he had not hitherto included among those that came from the Spirit. It is more than a gift. It is not a faculty like that of speaking in tongues, or of teaching, or of healing, or of prophesying, or even of apostleship. It is more than any of these. “Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.”
But love is a matter of being, of being like Him who is love, whose entire nature consists of love manifesting itself in myriad forms. Paul knew, no less than his fellow apostle John, that “God is love” and that all who wish to live with God must be permeated with that same superlative quality, must, in as great a degree as a transformed nature will permit, also be love.
As the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians crowns the twelfth, so should Christian love crown the possession and practice of any spiritual gifts that might be bestowed upon us by the Spirit. Without that crown, our other gifts may prove to be more than “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” God forbid that our lives should produce such useless sounds!
Related:
Urgency of Receiving the Holy Spirit – Mark Finley’s Video Sermon
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